Murder in the Name of Honor (28 page)

Forensic pathologist Dr Philip Birch performed a wound-pattern analysis on Tina's body. He found six stab wounds in close proximity in her solar plexus. He later told reporters, ‘She was supposedly involved in a wild, free-for-all fight with a knife and it seemed very odd that all of the injuries were tightly-clustered in a specific area of the body.'

That's because stabbing victims usually thrash about, moving their arms and legs. It was highly unlikely that Tina had stayed still and also highly unlikely that her father, who was smaller than her, would have been able to hold his daughter still and stab her at the same time.

Investigators interviewed the paramedics who were first to arrive on the scene. They said Tina's arms were stretched out above her head, as if she had been restrained. The only other person in the room who could have held Tina's arms was her mother, Maria. Forensic analysis revealed Tina's blood and hair on the inside of the jumper that Maria was wearing at the time.

The prosecutors were convinced, but had a problem – would a jury believe that a father and mother could kill their own daughter, rather than their own claims that they had acted in self-defence?

Then investigators were hit with a bombshell. The FBI called them to say that US intelligence had photographed Zein Isa attending a meeting in Mexico with individuals who were known
to have ties to the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The FBI suspected that Zein was maintaining a safe house for any Middle Eastern ‘terrorist' who needed a place to hide.

As part of their surveillance of Zein, the FBI had placed recording devices in the family home. The tapes had run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, but because the Bureau did not consider Zein to be a serious player, they hadn't yet listened to the recordings.

The police then had to get the permission of the then Attorney General, Richard Thornberg, to release the recordings, as the publicity surrounding the case would alert others close to Zein and across the USA to the fact that they might be under surveillance.

Thankfully, Thornberg immediately gave them permission. The seven-minute tape provided them with damning evidence. It appalled the jury of seven women and five men and shocked court officials, who thought they had seen and heard everything before.

‘It's worse than any movie, any film, anything I thought that I would ever hear in my life,' assistant prosecutor Bob Craddick told the
New York Times
. It was also totally unique. This was the first time that the entirety of an honour killing and its run-up and aftermath had been recorded in full terrible detail.

The crucial part of the transcript started with Tina returning home from work.

Maria: ‘Where were you, bitch?'

Tina: ‘Working.'

Zein: ‘We are telling you that if you want to marry that black guy we won't accept that he marries you. Don't you have a conscience? It's fornication! What about your chastity, isn't it a scandal? ... Here, listen, my dear daughter, do you know that this is the last day? Tonight, you're going to die.'

Tina: ‘Huh?'

Zein: ‘Do you know that you are going to die tonight?'

[There is a pause, then screaming from Tina.]

Tina: ‘Mother, please help me! Mother, can't you make him stop?'

Zein: ‘Keep still, Tina!'

Tina: ‘Mother, please help me!'

Mother: ‘Huh? What do you mean?'

Tina: ‘Help! Help!'

Mother: ‘What help?'

Maria: ‘Are you going to listen? Are you going to listen?'

Tina: ‘Yes! Yes! Yes, I am!' [coughs] ‘No. Please!'

Maria: ‘Shut up!'

[Tina continues to cry and scream, but her voice is unintelligible.]

Zein: ‘Die! Die quickly! Die quickly!'

[Tina moans, briefly goes quiet, then screams one last time.]

Zein: ‘Quiet, little one! Die, my daughter, die!'

Tina was stabbed six times in the chest with a boning knife, which pierced her heart, a lung and her liver. The timing of the tape revealed that her parents waited for thirty minutes before calling the ambulance.

Zein admitted on the witness stand that he put his foot on his daughter's mouth to keep her quiet. His wife held her daughter's arms so she couldn't escape.

Further analysis of the tapes in the weeks leading up to the murder revealed that Zein was planning the murder of his daughter during this time. ‘She threatened me,' he told his wife, ‘and I'll put the knife in her hand after she falls. Leave the story to me.'

Soraia Salem, one of Tina's sisters who no longer lived at home, said the system had failed her sister. She said the family sought help from the police in the months before the murder, even asking for Tina to be placed in a foster home. But prosecutors said they found only one police report.

Her parents were both given the death sentence. Zein Isa died of diabetes while on death row on 17 February 1997. Maria's death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment without parole.

After the verdicts were read, a friend of the family who called herself Mrs Abraham expressed her dismay at the jury's failure to acknowledge the Palestinian culture. ‘I feel it's not right. We follow our religion.' She said the Isas had to discipline their daughter or lose respect. ‘They'd be embarrassed in front of everybody in the country like somebody when they go without their clothes outside.'

Amazingly, the USA seems to be startlingly unaware of so-called honour killings. The UK's Metropolitan Police and the Foreign and Commonwealth's Forced Marriage Unit regularly receive calls from US law enforcement officers looking for information on these crimes. That officers feel obliged to search abroad for answers highlights just how little honour killings are understood in the USA, a country with more than its fair share of incidents of domestic abuse as well as one of the largest immigrant populations in the world.

A UNIFEM report issued in 2003 stated that the health-related costs of rape, physical assault, stalking and homicide by intimate partners against their spouses in the USA amount to more than $5.8 billion every year. The US Department of Justice has found that women are far more likely to be the victims of violent crimes committed by intimate partners than men, especially when a weapon is involved. Moreover, women are much more likely to be victimized at home than in any other place.
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The Violence Policy Centre prepared an annual study detailing the reality of homicides committed against women and entitled
When Men Murder Women.
The latest study by the centre involved an analysis of the most recent Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR) data submitted to the FBI in the ten states with the highest female victim/male offender homicide rates in 2004.
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According
to the centre, there were 1,807 females murdered by males in single victim/single offender incidents. For homicides in which the victim-to-offender relationship could not be identified, ninety-two per cent of female victims (1,547 out of 1,689) were murdered by someone they knew. Of female homicide victims who knew their killers, sixty-two per cent (966) of were wives or intimate acquaintances of their killers.
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There are no known figures for murders within immigrant communities, or for honour killings. It is interesting to note, however, that there have been cases that seem to demonstrate an inequality in how men and women are sometimes treated by US courts.

For example, Jacqueline Hunt of Equality Now said her organization adopted a case of a woman who was killed by her husband in Maryland on 9 February 1994 several hours after finding her in bed with another man. Kenneth Peacock, a trucker from Maryland, kicked the man out of his home at gunpoint and then shot his wife Sandra in the head with his hunting rifle a few hours later.

Peacock fired once at his wife but missed her and he had to reload his rifle before fatally shooting her. He pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter. Judge Robert Cahill made some extraordinarily sympathetic statements when passing judgement: ‘I seriously wonder how many married men … would have the strength to walk away … without inflicting some corporal punishment, whatever that punishment might be. I shudder to think what I would do … I am forced to impose a sentence . . . only because I think I must do it to make the system honest.' He sentenced Peacock to eighteen months.

Action Alert criticized Judge Cahill, saying his statements in the Peacock case indicated a disregard for violence against women and a devaluation of the victim's life, as well as perpetuating the notion that married women in particular were the property of their husbands who had the right to inflict violence on them or kill them. ‘When such statements are made by a judge acting in an
official capacity, they represent state authority and are particularly dangerous to the rule of law and the fundamental right of all women to equality and equal protection of the law.'

Hunt said, ‘It is the changing of perception from that of women as property with no rights to that of women as equal partners that is the biggest challenge in our work to stop these crimes.'

The effectiveness of US law enforcement agencies is undeniable. In almost all of the cases reported, the perpetrators are in jail, but nothing has been put in place for the purposes of prevention. Immigrant community groups are seemingly reluctant to draw attention to a phenomenon they feel will further exacerbate the hostility already directed towards them since 9/11 and the onset of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This is despite the fact that the US media have woken up to the problem and have reported on scores of recent cases. For example, in January 2008 in Chicago, firefighters were called to a blaze at an apartment complex where more than seventy people were inside. Some people raced downstairs while others jumped from balcony windows. Remarkably, most escaped without serious injury.

The culprit was Subhash Chander, who confessed he had started the blaze after his daughter, Monika Rani, and her husband, Rajesh Kumar, married without his consent, which he saw as ‘a cultural slight'. Kumar was from a lower caste than Rani.
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Monika, aged twenty-two, her husband and their three-year-old son perished in the fire. The autopsy revealed that Monika was five months pregnant with their second child.

Chander, aged fifty-seven, was charged with three counts of first-degree murder, aggravated arson and intentional homicide of an unborn child.
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Smita Narula, the faculty director of the Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law who has studied the effects of the Indian caste system, said violence over caste differences and inter-caste marriages still occurred in
India, although discrimination against the lowest caste has been outlawed for decades. ‘What is surprising,' Ms Narula said, ‘is that it might happen here.'

It is happening a lot more often than people realize. Also in January 2008, a double honour killing rocked the small town of Lewisville, Texas.

‘Ma'am, what is your address?' the emergency line operator asked. A woman had just called in to report that she and her sister had been shot.

‘I‘m dying,' she said, crying. Then the line went dead.

The police spent the next hour trying to pinpoint the location of the phone signal when another call came in from a hotel employee to report a taxi in the hotel's cab queue with no driver and a body slumped in the passenger seat and another in the back seat.

At the scene, police found the bodies of seventeen-year-old Sarah Yaser Said and her eighteen-year-old sister, Amina Yaser Said. The car was quickly traced to their father, Yaser Abdel Said, a fifty-year-old Egyptian-born cab driver.

Yaser Abdel Said has been on the run since that night. Police believe that he may have successfully fled the country.
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The teenagers were inseparable and popular students. Their mother, Patricia Said, called for her husband to turn himself in to authorities. Their nineteen-year-old brother, Islam Said, simply said his father ‘messed everything up'.

There had been conflict between father and daughters over their adaptation to western life, including relationships they may have had with non-Muslim boys. This clashed starkly with the strict Middle Eastern culture in which Yaser Abdel Said grew up. Said immigrated to the USA in 1983 and was granted citizenship in 1997.

In 1998 the girls, still children, accused their father of sexual abuse, according to an investigation carried out by the
Dallas Morning News
. The charges were later dropped after the girls
said they had made up the story. Fellow students described their classmates arriving to school with injuries consistent with abuse. One student said Amina told him about her father walking into her bedroom waving a gun.

The month before he killed them, in December 2007, Yaser Abdel Said reported his two daughters and their mother missing to the Lewisville Police Department. According to a police report, the next day Patricia Said called police to say that she and the two teens were safe but that ‘she was in great fear for her life' and that concern for their well-being had prompted them to flee.

The missing persons' case was closed. ‘We were able to verify that their welfare was no longer in question, so we closed that report,' Captain Keith Deaver, a spokesman for the Lewisville police told ABC News. The three returned to Lewisville on New Year's Eve, the day before the fatal shooting.

Significantly, in October 2008, the FBI used the term ‘honour killing' for the first time when it made Yaser Abdel Said the ‘featured fugitive' on its website. This is the first official recognition that honour killings take place in the USA and represents a welcome and long overdue change.
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Later that same year, on 5 July 2008, in Jonesboro, Georgia, Chaudhry Rashid strangled his twenty-four-year-old daughter Kanwal with a bungee cord. On 1 July she had filed for divorce from the man she had been forced to wed in Pakistan. Police found Rashid sitting behind a vehicle in the driveway. ‘My daughter is dead,' he told police. He said he could not accept the ‘disgrace' a divorce or affair would bring on his family, according to a police spokesperson. In court, a detective quoted Rashid: ‘God will protect me. God is watching me. I strangled my daughter.'
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